Your New Wingman Is: Your Smartphone

It used to be that your best friend was your favorite wingman. Now, your favorite wingman is your smartphone. It might even be your new best friend.

For years, the online dating industry has been dominated by profile-based dating sites like Match and eHarmony. There's no denying that their success has been monumental, but they are not without flaws: most of your time on a traditional dating site is spent on "administrative" duties, rather than actual dating.

First you spend hours agonizing over your profile. Then you spend countless more hours browsing, reading, and filtering profiles. Then you spend - you guessed it - even more hours crafting and responding to messages, screening strangers over the phone, email, and instant messages, and finally setting up dates with the few who pass your extensive tests.

That's safe, but it isn't exactly fun or spontaneous...and "fun" and "spontaneity" are what we really love about dating, right?

Smartphones are bringing the fun and spontaneity back to dating with location-based mobile dating apps. Grindr, the popular gay-meet-up app, was the first service to take advantage of the constant Internet access and GPS functionality provided by smartphones.

"Grindr solves a very big problem in the lives of gay men," explains Grindr chief executive Joel Simkhai. "How do I find other gay men?" The answer is simple: sign up for the app, then be given access to the location and profiles of all available men within a certain radius.

Grindr was a smashing success in almost every country in the world. 1.1 million members user Grindr daily in 192 countries...which means that only four countries don't have at least one person on Grindr.

Following the explosion of Grindr, the same team released Blendr, a similar (though not quite as successful) app for straight singles. OkCupid also jumped on the location-based bandwagon with an app called OkCupid Local, perfect for its younger, tech savvy users. Older sites like Match and eHarmony have gone mobile, but have yet to embrace location-based dating.

It's not all fun and games and sexy singles for users of these apps - there are safety and privacy concerns, and worries that only people looking for quick hookups will use them - but on the whole they are successful in bringing the spontaneity back to dating.

And don't forget what your smartphone was originally intended for: storing and calling the numbers of potential dates. Scribbling your digits on a booze-soaked cocktail napkin or handing out stuffy business cards were never very smooth moves.